The other night I was catching up on YouTube, still trying to get back up to speed on my favorite channels after the holiday weekend, and I saw a video with 38 one-minute recipes from 5-Minute Crafts. I went to it, and although the recipes would take way longer than a minute each to actually make, a few of them looked quite interesting. In one of them, they flattened a piece of bread in the middle and cracked an egg into it, added seasoning and cheese, and baked it at 350° (although they said 180°C because they’re dirty heathens) for 20 minutes.

I thought: I should try that!

Tonight, facing the question of what to make for dinner, I decided this was a perfect way to use up one of my leftover Kaiser rolls. So I sliced one open, flattened both sides in the middle to form cups, and cracked an egg into each side. Into the oven they went, without seasoning since I planned to do that later, and without cheese since that was also going to be for later.

Good gads was that an epic fail. The whites never set up properly, requiring me to give them more time—I gave up after about 7 more minutes. After that, one of the eggs set up but it was all gummy, while the other one was a mix of gummy and still runny. The yolks were both well on their way to hard-boiled, and looked on the surface like they were covered in warped plastic wrap.

I threw the result out and had a microwave cheeseburger. And now I want blood, because those crafty jerks lied to me.

Of course it’s possible that the Kaiser rolls were a big part of the problem here. Maybe they didn’t transfer enough heat, each half being denser than a slice of white bread. I suppose that might be what went wrong. But still, you’d think that might only add a minute or two at most to the cooking time, wouldn’t you? I mean the heat of the oven should still have been enough to set the whites in that time, I would think, but it never came together.

If my Kaiser theory is correct, and this is only something I could confirm by wasting time and bread and eggs on another experiment I’m extremely dubious about, then that would imply the dimensions and makeup of the vessel used to hold the eggs matters so much that no recipe online for baking eggs could be trusted to produce consistent results. (Also, some of those recipes call for covering the eggs in milk. What the…?)

This is a darn shame, because I was really hoping to find a new way to cook eggs that didn’t involve me having to clean a pan, or dirty one. With baking I can just throw some foil onto a cookie sheet and cleanup is trivial. But apparently we can’t have nice things—at least, not when taking directions from a stupid clickbait video.

For general interest, by the way, my plan was to use both halves of the roll and put a slice of American cheese on each, then put a few strips of warmed-up leftover bacon in between them to make a sandwich. It would’ve been glorious.